I am sooo glad that this was think week’s critical play because last week I got addicted to a game (I’m not joking, I played for 8 hours straight when I had so much work to do), and I had told myself I wouldn’t play it anymore. But this week I get to! The website is colonist.io, and it is a digital version of Settlers of Catan. Colonist.io is available on the web and on mobile (😩 let me live! Once I learned it was in the app store I would play this game on my phone everywhere I went). It was developed by Goktug Yilmaz, and the target audience is lovers of strategy games, especially Settlers of Catan. This game is even better than settlers of Catan because you can play with bots who make moves lickity-split . No waiting for people to hem and haw over what their next move will be (I played both rounds with real people for this assignment). This online game is a dream come true for people with ADHD. It is listed as being for ages 4+, but the chat feature is limited for children under 13. This game is the best game EVER!!
Thesis: Colonist.io puts people at risk of addiction through the combination of randomness, pseudo-randomness, rankings and bots.
Distribution of Resources
The first instance of randomness is the way the resources and number tiles are distributed on the board. Once gameplay starts, you will receive up to 6 resources every time the number of a resource you are touching is rolled. The numbers range from 2-12 (as it is a two dice game), excluding 7. How the board is set up is so important, because some resources are much more valuable than others. If there ends up being a 6 or an 8 on timber or bricks, every player is going to fight for it. Where the ports are located is also very important. Ports allow you to trade resources 3-1 versus the standard 4-1 in general game play. Resource specific ports allow you to trade 2-1. If you can choose a resource with a 6 or 8 tile next to a matching port, you are in great shape. I believe the distribution of number tiles is not completely random, because I never see instances of 6 and 8 being adjacent. I think the designers chose to have some mechanism of splitting up the high-probability numbers to increase competition and fun.
Distribution of resources vs distribution of numbers. Combined, there are four 6’s and 8’s, but there are also 4 each of wheat and timber. The wheat and timbers frequently end up adjacent (sometimes even 3 in a row!), but you never see adjacent 6’s and 8’s. This is why I believe it is pseudo-randomness.Â
Settlement Selection Process
The next instance of chance in this game is the order that players get to pick the location of their first settlement. The order is random, and the first player gets to pick from any location on the board (very lucky). It goes all the way around until it reached the last person, and then they get to place two settlements in a row (even luckier)! Then it snakes back to the first player in reverse order so that the very first person to place a settlement is also the very last person to place a settlement. When you place your second settlement, you get one of each resource you are touching. In one of my games, the person didn’t select a location in time, and the game randomly chose a port for them. It was a bad strategic location, and they immediately left 🤣 That is how important randomness can be in this game!
“Bot is placing a road for Zambigo” –> “omg. i’m out”
Random Accumulation of Resources
The input randomness associated with accumulating resources makes this game highly addictive. Whether you are able to buy what you want on the next round is fully dependent on the dice rolls that happen between your turn. This incorporates the idea of “near misses” that we saw in the reading on the slot machines. In this game, there are so many ways you have a near miss. Someone can roll a number super close to the number you need, they can roll the number of the resource adjacent to the number you need. The person before you can steal a card from you, taking the resource you need for your next action. This cycle of heightened anticipation and arousal surrounding the unknowable is exactly what makes apps like TikTok so addicting.
Random Depletion of Resources
Another aspect of input randomness occurs when any player rolls a 7. The player that rolled the 7 gets to move the “robber” to any resource hexagon, and that location will not pay out until the robber is moved (either by someone else rolling a 7 or by someone playing a robber card). The player playing the robber also gets to steal a card from one of the players touching the resource, which introduces output randomness, because it is unknown the card that each player will lose/receive. What’s even worse is that any time a 7 is rolled every player with more than 7 cards has to discard HALF! Literally my least favorite rule of any game every. But this mechanic directly introduces another opportunity for addiction. They say abusive relationships are addictive because of the unpredictability — you never know which version of your partner you will come home to. As someone who used to be in extremely toxic relationships — this is exactly like that! These dice are like a boyfriend who will always come home with a gift or a fight. The repeated cycles of something good, something good, something good BOOM something horrible puts players in a constant state of fight or flight. Which is very addictive.
Wait okay there is no way this is 900 words already I could write 1,500 more 😩😩😩
The cliffnotes version is that this game also has developer cards that give you special abilities. People can get free resources, place down roads for free, move the robber anytime they want, have a secret point so you think you have at least a few more rounds to make something happen and then out of nowhere: game is over. You don’t know the order of the cards or when someone will choose to play them.
Randomness Compared to Other Games
Since deciding to wean myself off of this game, I have been playing chess. Chess is waaaaay less random than colonist.io. I enjoy it, but I don’t get caught up in the high arousal cycle because I am able to create with reasonable accuracy what will happen next. A game like Pokemon probably has a comparable amount of randomness and pseudo-randomness. What spawns near you isn’t truly random, and the success of your throws or attacks is more random but still not truly random. I also used be addicted to Pokemon Go (I walked 11 miles the first time I played). Something about the high-stakes anticipation of random actions just really snatches me up.
Ethics
I think randomness and chance are always permissible in analog games where people can adapt the rules if they want. I do think that gambling is a serious addiction, and, as we saw in our reading, predatory. When these high-arousal cycles are targeted at children, I think it is so unacceptable. Learning about Fortnight in section two weeks ago literally made me sick. These people belong in JAIL. I was literally in prison with people who did far far far less. The more I learn about technology, the more I hate it.
This is a little random aside, but I think Haven or Amy will read this, so maybe you will understand. I was talking to Sean Szumlanski about how excited I am to be done coording and have my summer free. He asked why, and I was trying to explain to him that notifications on my phone were addictive just like gambling. They say in gambling, the thing that hooks people is the stimulation of the reward system associated anticipation followed by a high-impact outcome. This is exactly how I feel every time my phone buzzes. 99% of the time it is nothing, but 1% of the time it is a HUGE deal like asap immediate CS198 emergency. Because of this, I reach for my phone every single time it vibrates. It is the #cs198-random outcome that gets me. Okay bad pun sorry this is so long I am just really really in love with this game. I hope you have a great long weekend <3
Appendix
People talking about how bad the dice rolls were this game:
You can actually control this when you play the bots, which I think is really cool:
Where it says “Dice: Balanced” you can change it to be truly random (it is in multiplayer games, but you can change it against bots).Â
